BOOK EXCERPT: AMY CHUA ON MODERN HYPERPOWERS
This extract from the book Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - And Why They Fail by Amy Chua looks at today's faltering hyperpower, the US, and its ever-expanding rival, China.
The US versus China
When the term hyperpower was first applied to the United States, it was not intended favourably. As France's Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine described it, the United States had become “dominant or predominant in all categories”: America had attained not only economic, military, and technological preeminence, but also a “domination of attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life.”
Today, the idea of an America “dominant in all categories” does not ring quite as true. America remains the world's economic and military powerhouse, but it is beleaguered on many fronts, its confidence shaken, its reputation bruised, its coffers depleted by hundreds of billions poured into a war it may not win. Meanwhile, other emerging powers are shifting and jockeying for position. Could China, the EU, or perhaps some other contender – such as India – overtake the United States in the near future?
This book is about hyperpowers – not great powers, not even superpowers, but hyperpowers. Many have written about empires. To date, however, no one has systematically analyzed the far rarer phenomenon of hyperpowers: the remarkably few societies – barely more than a handful in history – that amassed such extraordinary military and economic might that they essentially dominated the world. This is a special category, acutely relevant to the present day, whose hidden dynamics have yet to be laid bare. How does a society come to be a world dominant power?
The thesis of this book is as follows. For all their enormous differences, every hyperpower in history was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was indispensable to the achievement of hegemony. Just as strikingly, the decline of empire has repeatedly coincided with intolerance and xenophobia. But here's the catch: It was also tolerance that sowed the seeds of decline. In virtually every case, tolerance eventually hit a tipping point, triggering conflict, hatred, and violence.
Why has tolerance been so vital? There's actually a simple explanation.
To be world-dominant – not just locally or regionally dominant – a society must be at the forefront of the world's technological, military, and economic development. And at any given historical moment, the most valuable human capital the world has to offer – whether in the form of intelligence, physical strength, skill, knowledge, networks, drive, or creativity – is never to be found within any one ethnic or religious group. To pull away from its rivals on a global scale, a society must pull into itself and motivate the world's best and brightest, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or background. This is what every hyperpower in history has done – from Achaemenid Persia to the Great Mongol Empire to the British Empire – and the way they have done it is through tolerance.
But wait – the Mongols were tolerant? Genghis Khan's ravaging hordes razed entire villages, then used the corpses as moat-fill. Persia's King Darius sliced off the ears and noses of his enemies before impaling them. (One of Darius' predecessors, King Cambyses, skinned a corrupt official, turning him into chair upholstery.) The British Empire, according to the entire field of post-colonial studies, was built on the racism and condescension of the White Man's Burden. Can these empires possibly be described as tolerant?
I'm going to suggest that the answer, surprisingly, is yes. But that's because I'm not talking about tolerance in the modern, human rights sense. By tolerance, I don't mean political or cultural equality. Rather, as I will use the term, tolerance simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons. To define the term a little more formally, tolerance in this book will refer to the degree of freedom with which individuals of different ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or other backgrounds are permitted to co-exist, participate, and rise in society.
Tolerance in this sense does not imply respect. Tolerance, moreover, can be selectively deployed. Finally, in the race for world dominance, what matters most is not whether a society is tolerant according to some absolute, timeless standard, but whether it is more tolerant than its competitors.
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The United States is perhaps the quintessential example of a society that rose to global dominance through its relative tolerance. Of course, for much of its history the United States was no more an exemplar of human rights than were the Romans or the Mongols. Americans kept slaves; they brutally displaced indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, from the beginning, through a genuinely revolutionary commitment to religious freedom as well as a market system unusually open to individuals of all classes and diverse nationalities, the United States attracted, rewarded, and harnessed the energies and ingenuities of tens of millions of immigrants.
This immigrant manpower and talent propelled the country's growth and success from westward expansion to industrial explosion to victory in World War II. Indeed, America's winning the race for the atomic bomb was a direct result of its ability to attract immigrant scientists fleeing persecution in Europe. In the decades after the War, with Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement, the United States at last began, however fitfully and imperfectly, to develop into one of the most ethnically and racially open societies in world history. Not coincidentally, this was also the period in which the United States achieved world dominance.
America's emergence as a hyperpower in the last decade of the twentieth century was in part the consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse. But it also reflected the United States' staggering technological and economic dominance in the burgeoning Computer Age, and this dominance once again stemmed directly from America's superior ability to pull in talented and enterprising individuals from all over the world. Silicon Valley, which catalyzed the greatest explosion of wealth in the history of man – and directly fueled America's unrivaled military preeminence – was to an astonishing extent an immigrant creation.
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What will the twenty-first century bring? Many predict America's imminent decline – if it hasn't begun already. Meanwhile, there is much talk about “the rising dragon.” Will China be the world's next hyperpower?
Any way you look at it, China's economic transformation has been breathtaking. For the last thirty years, China's economy has been expanding at the phenomenal rate of 9.5% annually. In 2003, China overtook the United States as the most popular destination for foreign direct investment. No longer is China dominant merely in labor-intensive manufacturing. Today, China is the number one producer of consumer electronics, and moving quickly into the manufacture of computer chips, automobiles, jet engines, and military weaponry.
While the United States continues to battle increasing global hostility, China has quietly connected with nearly all of the world's major countries, both developed and developing, often using debt forgiveness and foreign aid to boost its public image and leverage deals. In the process, China has locked up long-term contracts for billions of tons of Chilean copper, Australian coal, Brazilian iron, and the other raw materials it desperately needs to feed its exploding economic machine.
In an ironic twist, China has done particularly well by taking advantage of the West's refusal to deal with “rogue states.” In the Middle East and Africa, for example, China has openly refused to condition trade on compliance with international human rights treaties, as have the EU and the United States, giving China greater access to valuable resources in countries like Sudan, Angola, Burma, Congo, and Libya. Meanwhile, adding insult to injury, a recent Pew Foundation global survey found that a majority of citizens in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom now view China more favorably than the United States.
